dreamin'

Recently, I've been having a lot of vivid, exciting, and mildly to extraordinarily disturbing dreams. I only recall fragments when I wake up, hours before my alarm, heart pounding and legs kicking. The other night I was an experienced sky diver on a mission. I enthusiastically prepared to jump, apparently to go and...rescue something? someone?... and was all business as usual. I actually felt like I knew what I was doing. Cool! Less cool - I woke before we jumped. Totally uncool - I actually felt nauseous from the turbulence hitting the small plane.

Often, the same "sets" appear in many of my dreams. I've been dreaming about these operatic theater house stairs for years. These dreams prominently feature dark wood, red velvet, running up and down the stairs, and a sense of dread and foreboding. Something bad always happens during these dreams - I can never remember exactly what, but I always wake up with an aftertaste of fear. These are not good nights and I wake to find myself tired and emotionally drained. I wonder what is going on in my head - I have a recurring fear of...the opera?

A few nights ago, I dreamed that I was being chased by a T-Rex, which cracked out of its life-sized model display at the museum into "reality." Somehow, the monster chased us (with quite a few narrower-than-I'd like escapes) into a world-afflicted-by-plague, must-separate-the-contaminated (of which I was one)-type situation. It was very upsetting, because I kept missing the boats to the notleper colony, and was marked for extermination. They were hunting me down in an amusement park - think of the children!

There've been a lot of chase dreams in the past few weeks. I wonder what I'm stressed about, exactly? Everything might not be roses, but I don't have too many specific worries hounding my conscious mind at the moment, so I wonder why my unconscious is so upset...

If these movie dreams involved less of my imminent death, I think I might enjoy them.